EDITORIAL: Here's why the IOC must keep wrestling in the Olympic Games

View full sizeOklahoma State wrestler Jordan Oliver of Easton, shown here after winning an NCAA title in 2011, competed in the Olympic trials last year.Express-Times Photo | MATT SMITH

Don’t slap the mat just yet. There must be some way to reverse a decision that punishes a group of athletes who work as hard as any in the world of sport, who keep alive a tradition as old as mankind every time they walk onto the mat.

The International Olympic Committee executive board’s recommendation to knock wrestling out of the Olympic Games, starting in 2020, is unthinkable. The official line from the IOC is that wrestling simply isn’t telegenic enough — it doesn’t lend itself to TV ratings that attract money to the quadrennial Summer Games. And it isn’t the type of trendy, accessible activity to which young people are increasingly turning. That’s why wakeboarding, inline skating and sport climbing are in the running to be included in the IOC’s 25 “core sports” for 2020. It’s also why golf (ugh) will be part of the 2016 games in Rio de Janeiro, and why baseball and softball are petitioning to be reinstated.

Look, wrestling doesn’t need to be defended in a comparative glamor contest before the IOC. It can stand on its own. There’s no need to drag down equestrian, synchronized swimming, trampoline gymnastics and table tennis (even though we’re tempted) to affirm the pre-eminence of wrestling as a worthy global competition. Of Olympic competition.

Here’s why the IOC must reconsider.

For amateur wrestling, the Olympics is the holy grail. You can’t say that of every sport. Last summer, Scotland’s Andy Murray won the Olympic gold medal in tennis, and the big question was: Would he trade it for a Wimbledon title? If you have to ask …

Wrestling in the Olympics dates to 708 B.C. It is a true global sport, even if some countries opt out. The IOC’s decision hit Pennsylvania’s and New Jersey’s hotbeds of scholastic and collegiate wrestling like a thunderbolt this week — just as it did in comparable communities in Iowa, Michigan, Oklahoma, Russia, Bulgaria, Cuba and Iran. Where wrestling is king, wrestling is the game of games — a singular struggle that rewards skill, strength, quickness, endurance, craftiness, courage … and intelligence.

The United States has a lot to lose. It leads the world with 125 Olympic wrestling medals, 50 of those gold. One of those golds resides with Easton High and Lehigh University standout Bobby Weaver, from the 1984 Los Angeles games, who delighted the world when he ran victory laps around the ring with his infant son in his arms.

So maybe the names Bruce Baumgartner, Dan Gable, Rulon Gardner, Cael Sanderson and Jordan Oliver don’t mean much to people who are still reliving the Super Bowl or can’t wait for the next WWE event. To the youngsters starting out in wrestling, to those competitors heading into the postseason right now and their coaches, those names are a reason to keep trying, to keep looking up.

To those who reach the top levels of the sport, the opportunity to compete in the Olympics is everything.